Hey friend, listen. I know the world is scary right now. Corruption, war, inflation, demographics,
degeneracy, disease, unrest, hatred and despair. We didn't come here to tell you how it is.
But that it's going to get way better.
Better. Bye Bitcoin.
All right. Welcome everybody. We got Skylar and Jordan in the house tonight.
What's up y'all?
What's up guys?
So Skylar, we wanted to bring you on because you are a designer focusing on the Bitcoin space.
You now have a company called Finite Supply where you are focusing on Bitcoin companies.
You're leading one of the leaders in terms of how do we think about what Bitcoin companies should look like,
how they should feel, how they interact with the community and the larger outside world, outside of the Bitcoin space.
So I wanted to get your update on how you've been. I saw you six months ago or so.
And I also wanted to get your take on how Bitcoin and design are connected and what that looks like.
So yeah, Skylar, give us your 30 seconds.
Thanks for having me on.
The last year, I mean, so basically I started Finite Supply a year ago.
May 22nd, actually, Bitcoin Pizza Day is when I tweeted out, I am starting a design agency for Bitcoin companies.
Does anyone want to work with me? And then it's been insane.
It's been an amazing year.
Trying to think. Lately, I have been pushing, I've been designing a lot of hats.
So that's been like a fun creative outlet that's like more independent.
It's definitely not like core business aspect, but it's like fun.
So I keep making hats. And recently I've been doing a lot of work with Ocean.
I may be working on some knots designs, which is fun.
But it's funny too when you have multiple clients that disagree with each other.
That's a very unique thing for Bitcoin.
It's like, I have great clients over here, great clients over here, but they don't really get along.
So that's kind of fun.
So you're working for Shinobi is what you're telling us.
I don't think I could ever do that.
But anyways, I think it's like on the topic of Bitcoin and design.
Does Bitcoin make design better?
Not by itself.
I think like Bitcoin exacerbates the or no, it elucidates.
It like shows and clarifies who people really are and what their abilities really are.
And it like kind of like cuts away grift.
So because of that, like people that have a lot of Bitcoin.
I like want to expect them to have taste as well and be like these Renaissance men like in a century ago.
These guys that would just like design a beautiful home, build a library for their like city.
You know, be like commissioning amazing works of art.
Da Vinci's and Michelangelo's.
But really it's like, I think Fiat has degraded most individuals and just like the kind of, I don't like the word education, but it's like they were classically educated in like all these different things,
which made them like connoisseurs of beauty, goodness and truth in a way that just no one really is anymore.
It's like so rare.
I mean, all of our billionaires, they don't have taste.
All the millionaires don't have taste.
Like it's like all of these realms of wealth.
It's like who has taste anymore?
So the short answer is I think Bitcoin can give people extra purchasing power to build great things, design great things.
But they have to become better in order to do those things.
So you have to become worthy of building these better things, which requires a lot more than just Bitcoin.
What I'm hearing you say is that we can't just sanctify all of our tastes and immediate intuitive ideas as being great art.
That's what I'm hearing you say.
You're saying there actually are constraints that actually constitute great art.
And we actually have to constrain ourselves to those constraints and actually get better by some objective-ish standard.
Because if you're going to convince people to give up their Bitcoin, it's going to have to be something that they deem worthy of and that's exercised and required lots of excellence and hard work.
Yeah, for sure.
I see people that hold Bitcoin as the patrons.
But the problem is in order to commission something amazing, you have to know what amazing is.
I'm kind of bummed to see that that doesn't really exist.
Our billionaire classes are all just STEM tech guys.
Some of them are legacy business owners and stuff, but they're not renaissance men.
You look back a century, early American entrepreneurs were just dabbling in so many different things and so good at so many different things.
Elon's an interesting example of this.
It doesn't look like he has taste.
It looks like he can bring people around him that have some semblance of a taste.
It just doesn't seem like one of his things is caring about beauty.
Another thing about the early OG Bitcoiners is it didn't select for renaissance men, it selected for a certain type of person as well.
I don't think that group of people is necessarily conducive to bringing beauty and bringing design into the world, better design into the world.
Cypherpunks, yeah.
They bring privacy and they bring encryption and cool things like that, but not necessarily the most beautiful stuff.
Jordan.
It's interesting, right?
We're going to hop right into the full-blown Christian stuff here.
One of the things that makes me think of is the difference between a wartime king and a peacetime king.
You have somebody like David, who is the greatest warrior in Israel's history, both as a child and then as a king.
He goes through his whole career as king.
It's bloody.
He gets to the end of his life and he wants to be the one.
He's been very useful.
It's been very helpful.
It needed to happen.
He needed to exist.
What he did needed to happen, but it came at a high cost.
When he gets to the end of his life and wants to be the one to build the temple, he wants to be the one to build this beautiful thing.
God goes, no, no, no.
You're not going to be the guy.
He calls his son, who hasn't killed anybody, who's very much a more peacetime person.
This idea of there being two different generations, generational differences, is necessary.
Hey, we needed these cypherpunks.
Bitcoin wouldn't exist if it wasn't for them, but now we get on to a different generation and we need different things now.
It's not that they're not necessary.
It's just that we need more in addition to them.
I guess a counterpoint I thought of, or not a counterpoint, but it slightly challenges that, is he did write and wrote music, poems.
Who did?
Oh, David.
Okay, cool.
Huge musician, poet.
This is true.
That is a huge...
He wasn't an architect.
Also a dancer.
He was a big dancer.
Dancer, musician, poet.
I think that he was sort of a renaissance man.
Correct.
Philosopher king.
He really was a more robust...
He's more robust than just a warrior.
That's all I would add.
It's not like a contradiction.
Again, he wasn't the one to build the temple, which is a drastically different thing.
What would you say his son was?
I love that you're fleshing this out better.
I was just talking to somebody about this yesterday.
From the beginning of the scriptures, one of the things that you see is this question of...
You have this...
God basically solves for this existential crisis of what does it mean to be human?
God creates mankind with certain things in mind, certain callings that he calls them to,
and he designs them for certain purposes.
Right now, this is something where we're going...
Just culturally, societally, we're going through this giant existential crisis of
what does it mean to be human, what is anything, and how do we know?
This idea...
If you were to put these in categories, you have the three things that God...
He says one thing about humanity in Genesis, the first three chapters of Genesis.
He says, let us make man in our image.
He says, boom.
What it means to be human is to be made in the image of God.
Then he says three things to them.
He tells them to do three things.
He says, be fruitful, multiply.
He says to guard and keep the garden.
That's the third thing.
Subdue and exercise dominion.
That's the three things.
With multiplication, be fruitful, multiply, that's the idea of sonship.
Have kids.
If you have image bearers, that's having kids.
Then you have subdue and exercise dominion.
The words that are translated, subdue and exercise dominion,
are translated and repeated all throughout the rest of the Bible
to describe the work of the kings of Israel.
Be a son, be a king, and then to guard and keep,
which is what their work in the garden was supposed to be,
that is used...
The Hebrew words that are translated as guard and keep
are repeated all throughout the rest of the Bible
to describe the work of the priests, the priesthood class.
According to the scriptures, what it means to be human
is to be a son, to be a king, and to be a priest.
With Solomon, you do see David do that.
He succeeds in...
I guess you could argue he has the priestly things
because he does commune with God.
He loves God, so there's that element there.
Solomon has some of that too.
He just doesn't have the bloody history.
It's not so much that David was incomplete,
it's just that David had all the good stuff,
but then he also had this stain, this bloodiness to him
that Solomon didn't have.
Solomon was pretty amazing in terms of his wisdom.
He wasn't an engineer only type of guy.
He had a breadth of knowledge.
I think really what I want to actionable advice,
I would say, is we should all just cultivate
a better approach to looking at the world
and accurately judging what goodness, beauty and truth are.
Every human being should just do that
and just be better at that.
I was thinking about this.
I was looking at a lot of old buildings.
One reason modernists really hate classical design
is I think they are just totally...
It's pastiche.
Yeah, well, I think they feel judged by it
because the excellence and the craft are...
It's just like, I don't know how to do that.
Therefore, it's bad.
I think that's the thing.
Or it's pretentious.
The reason why they did this is because they were pretentious
and I'm not pretentious and so I don't want to be like that.
But I just think that's cope.
It's all cope.
Yeah, 100% cope.
Agreed, yeah.
Well, for me, I don't know if you saw my post on it,
just tagging your post from yesterday, Skylar,
but the idea of...
A lot of that's ornamentation.
If we're going to make a spiral staircase
versus just a square fire exit,
it's like, well, we're going to have to spend a lot more time and money.
We're going to have to design it.
We're going to have to get the right skill set to build it.
We're going to have to source all these new materials
and cut the materials and put it all together,
all of that is time and money.
In a fiat world, there's just no time and no money.
Nobody values that.
You can apply that to the whole ecosystem and it just says,
no, actually, the thing that defines good design at that point
is just square patterns that are done, that are executed well.
An A-frame is considered a beautiful pattern for a house
or a cabin and all that.
And it's like, yeah, it looks pretty neat in some cases,
but it's almost like a trick because there's no ornamentation for it.
There's no pushing on anything that takes extraordinary skills
to actually create.
Well, I think on that architecture...
So Leon Krier is one of my... I just love him.
He's this... He's still alive,
but he's this architect that is all about bringing classicism
into modern-day building as much as you can.
And he talks a lot about how there's...
Buildings should be as diverse as the races, basically.
Each place has a specific type of person,
a specific type of housing, a specific type of design
that actually makes sense.
So it's like this more localist...
Yeah, I guess that's right.
Vernacular is a better way to say it.
Vernacular design is what humans can do
in their particular environments.
So he's a big advocate of that,
whereas the modernist style, the international style,
is you apply the same spreadsheet-style building
to everything everywhere,
which is very similar to what the Internet is.
It's like every website is the same
because it's basically this commodification of UI.
But the reason I'm bringing this up is
I'm not very judgmental of a lot of unique building styles
because if it jives with the place,
then it's closer to good than a modernist take would be.
I'm also not an ornament maximalist
because sometimes ornament makes sense.
Ornamentalist.
Yeah.
Sometimes it makes sense and sometimes it doesn't.
So I think that's part of what taste is.
It's knowing when to do the right thing
in the right circumstance.
Because the modernists were like...
Adolf Loos, L-O-O-S,
wrote this essay in 1910 called Ornament and Crime.
And basically saying functional design
should never have ornament.
It's a very interesting read.
It's like one of those angry Internet atheists
that hate God.
Like, I hate God and he doesn't exist type of things.
Like, I hate ornamentation and it shouldn't exist.
So he's just very angry at ornamentation.
So that's anti-ornament.
But there's also some people that are pro-ornament everything.
And I think that's wrong too.
Could you just, real quick,
I'm just imagining if there's people listening to this
who are like, eh, what's ornament?
Now they could probably Google these things.
But in a 30 second summary, what is ornamentation?
I think, I mean, I would like to have Stephen
describe this too.
But I see it as decoration that doesn't serve
a purely functional, utilitarian purpose.
Okay.
That sounds about right.
It's something, in my mind, it's something that speaks
almost entirely to the aesthetics, the look,
the feeling you get from something.
Not, it's the form versus function thing.
It's like, no, it's literally pure form.
There's no, like the functionality of it is that
maybe you can take a beautiful photo, right?
Yeah, but it's not inherent to the actual building.
The actual functioning of the space, yeah.
Unless the space is meant to function as a, I don't know,
a music hall or something where beautiful music
is meant to be played or something.
Like, you kind of have to like push the arguments
in weird ways for it to really work.
But yeah, essentially, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, most people just don't like,
I mean, it's just sad that like a lot of things
have just stripped ornament away from everything.
And most people don't even know why.
You know, like if you drive through a suburb
in like a red state, it's like, you might as,
it's just like death.
Like, you're just like looking at death.
And it's like, yeah, they're like American dream homes,
but it's like, dude, that is a spreadsheet.
It's a horizontal spreadsheet
instead of a vertical spreadsheet.
And it's like, human beings should not live
in this sort of thing.
But I'm kind of pessimistic that like we can really,
escape that quickly.
I think it will take a long time to undo the damage
of like sprawl or like suburban sprawl.
But I don't know.
I mean, it's like the best you can do
is just kind of like fix your own home
and then learn how to do it.
And then, you know, make your bed, fix your home.
And then maybe someday we can build our own towns.
But I think that would be like kind of a worthy goal
for Bitcoiners to figure out is like,
how do you actually make a city
that is like beautiful and good?
But that, again, do people have the ability
to do this anymore?
I don't know.
Yeah.
In the present paradigm, I would say,
apart from very extreme circumstances,
like there's a city in Guatemala that's,
I think it's Guatemala, somewhere.
I have to look it up.
But it's 100% brand new city that was built without,
like we're not doing any cars.
It's like 100%.
Yeah, something like that.
So that was made by Leon Krier.
Yeah, okay, perfect.
He designed by that.
Yeah.
There are people that know how to do it
that have had success doing it,
that know like how to think on human scale terms,
not on international like skyscraper
and jet plane terms or even just car terms, right?
Yeah.
Thinking in terms of a car really kind of upsets
a human scale environment or community or dynamic
of how you want to interact with the world.
Yeah.
I think that, you know, for me personally,
as a Bitcoiner looking at it,
all I just see is how fiat has destroyed the world.
So for a lot of, like a lot of the pessimism for me
just comes from, oh, that's like as I described,
like, well, it's not that ornamentation
should always be used.
Yeah.
I totally agree with you.
It's like you have to use it in the right spot
for the right reason, right?
Yeah.
Did he freeze?
Oh, yes, he did.
So Skylar, so I mean with some of these things,
what have been some of the other people who have,
people or just movements that have affected
your design thought if there's people
who want to kind of chase them down?
I mean, the, it just kind of depends.
I think there's like, there's stuff to glean
from every period of design.
But, I mean, lately I've just really loved,
it's also just fun to look at like,
I mean, typography is not that old.
In like, I mean, so I don't know.
It's kind of funny because like you look back
in the 1800s and there was a sans serif
created in the 1800s.
It's like, looks like Helvetica,
like the most standard font.
Really?
I forget the name of it.
I don't know if it's accidents grotesque
or if there's one before that.
I'm pretty sure there's one before that,
but it looks like just the most modern thing ever.
But like, you wouldn't think modernity
is like 1800, late 1800s.
But anyways, I just like love looking at fonts
and like you can basically take a lot
of inspiration just from that period.
So like, there's all these different things.
Like for Pierre Richard's company,
the Bitcoin Bond Company, we were looking at,
initially we were looking at like Rothschild,
Medici, all those like families and like wealth,
like sovereign wealth families.
And then eventually we realized like,
that's actually the wrong vibe.
That vibe is like too different from America.
It's like the American thing.
So then we were like, I was like,
we got to look at Ben Franklin
because Ben Franklin was like super responsible
for the American printing aesthetic.
Oh, cool.
Like he brought typefaces over from England
and would like print.
And he's like, I have my favorite font, it's Caslon.
And Caslon is like what everything should be typed in.
And so look into like Caslon,
like all the early documents were like,
you just, they would use Caslon.
So we're like, okay, we got to use Caslon
for the Bitcoin Bond Company.
I mean, it's just like a standard stuff,
you know, like you've seen it before.
So anyways, like I don't really have these ones that like,
it's kind of similar to the Leon career perspective.
It's just like, you just have to know when to use
which inspiration correctly.
So it's like when I was young in high school,
I was obsessed with this documentary called Helvetica.
And which is a, it's pretty funny,
fun documentary to watch if you're into design.
But like, basically it's about like Helvetica maximalism.
And it was like, everything should be in Helvetica.
It's like a very modernist thing.
So that was like my intro to like being a designer
is like Helvetica.
And then you learn and you grow up and you're like,
oh, actually you should use different things
in different ways for different purposes all the time.
So yeah, I grew out of the modernist maximalism
and into like just trying to do the right thing
at the right time.
This conversation is so crazy, man.
Because like, I've been just submerging my head
in this whole opporturn debate.
Oh gosh.
And dude, it has just been a trip.
Because there's so many things that are not intuitive
that like the grounding assumptions
that a lot of these arguments are being based on,
both for and against.
And like, it is just so interesting
because so much of the anti-opporturn
or like getting rid of the filters, that kind of stuff,
it is based on this idea that any filtration is arbitrary.
And so like, you can follow this,
you can extrapolate this more and go like,
all right, well then like, again, beauty is just,
beauty and actual goodness and design aesthetic
is just totally arbitrary.
There's nothing actually inherently,
or there's no actual truthful goodness at the core of this.
And it's just so fascinating.
Like how, again, we can't just neatly parse out these things.
Like they really do.
Like we're getting at something real and deep
and profound and ancient.
But we don't have, like this is like,
this is how I just keep thinking as I listen to them.
Like you don't have the muscle memory.
Like this is so far outside of your depth.
Like you guys are, like it's,
engineer muscles are very different
than philosopher muscles.
And especially moral philosophy.
Like the arguments you're making are not good arguments.
But you are experts in this engineering thinking,
which is super necessary, it's super good.
But the temptation is for you to despise and diminish
and just like, reasoning and evidence
that's got a different evidentiary standard
than engineering evidentiary standards.
And so it's just so fascinating.
And this is why I'm getting ready to do this piece on this,
or like do a video about this.
But like, one of the things that was really interesting
is they keep saying, oh, you know,
like the mechanic and all these guys are just,
you guys are making an ideological argument
and we're just making a technical argument.
And the problem is like,
how do you define what is a technical argument?
In order to define a technical argument,
you have to go outside of technical arguments
to make that argument.
Like you need ideological boundings in order to do this.
But they can't, they don't recognize it.
And so again, I'm sympathetic to that,
because again, it's like we have strengths that they need
and the core devs and all these guys,
they have strengths that we need.
And so we can't despise and just mock each other.
But it really is this super interesting thing
that you start to see, you know,
flesh itself out in all kinds of surprising places.
So there's, you know, to that point directly,
there's an incredible C.S. Lewis quote,
which I'm sure you guys are very familiar with.
Let me just read it for you.
Of course, let's go.
You cannot go seeing through things forever.
The whole point of seeing through something
is to see something through it.
It is good that the window should be transparent
because the street or garden beyond is opaque.
How, if you saw through the garden too.
It is no use trying to see through first principles.
If you see through everything,
then everything is transparent.
But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world.
To see through all things is the same as to not see.
Yeah.
When you talk about the ideological stuff
and like, oh, this small ideological framework
versus this other ideological framework,
it's like they're applying the ideology to something else.
And, you know, getting back to design,
we do the exact same thing.
This is where pastiche comes in.
Well, no, we hate all the classic stuff.
We hate reintroducing ornamentation.
We hate reintroducing all this stuff.
We hate looking at the world through other lenses
because our lens is, for some reason,
which we can't explain or defend,
is better than your lens.
Like, we just see through your lens.
We just see through, like, no, no, no,
you're wrong about this stuff.
And it's just, it's not, it's like,
sure, here's it.
Like, there's no humanitarian kind of understanding
wider, larger meta picture.
Yeah.
I mean, I will,
I would say that that mentality is pretty modernist,
which I think is dead.
Like, I think modernity is dead.
Like, so, it's funny that these tech,
the, we're the technical guys.
It reminds me of the early internet atheist
Four Horsemen guys, and it's like,
we have science, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, they're totally retarded on everything else,
but they, like, know some, like, science,
which is, like, not reproducible.
It's, like, totally fake anyways.
But they think it's real.
But it's, like, the,
they're, like, the dying modernists, right?
Where it's, like, we believe in this objective truth,
blah, blah, blah.
Like, yeah, we don't believe in God.
We just believe in this technical analysis.
It's, like, I feel like we are shifting,
or we have shifted fully into, like, post-modernity
for better and worse.
Like, it's good to destroy modernity
because modernity is rotten,
and it's, like, built on a fake God,
of, like, fake reason, fake truth, fake,
or rather a godless truth, a godless reason,
and a godless, you know, order.
But, so I think, like, the,
going back to the point about seeing,
they don't, people don't like seeing
through the nostalgia or seeing through, like,
the old ways of doing things.
I actually think post-modernity allows us
to do that sort of, like, thing
because now it's, like, this chaotic,
there is no order.
We kind of create the order,
and so now it's, like,
we can kind of just do whatever we want,
which means that we now have the opportunity
to do whatever we want,
which means let's bring nostalgia back.
Like, let's do that, you know?
I'm happy about that.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, like, the totally free market
is gonna, it's both gonna be catastrophic
because you're gonna be seeing people,
like, it's a, yeah,
it's an absolutely free ideological market,
so if you want to say you're a cat,
like, you're good.
If you want to say, like,
you could just go to the craziest extreme,
but it's gonna be, like, self-selecting
where, like, it's gonna be so stark,
the difference between people who are, like,
I mean, like, honestly,
I mean, all three of us have kids.
Like, I think this is one of those things
where it's so ironic
is that people are self-selecting,
like, by either not, again, it's like,
by not breeding or by breeding.
Obviously, we don't,
we would never call it breeding,
I'm saying that tongue-in-cheek,
but, like, by not having,
Well, you breed.
You breed.
So, but, like, it's one of these things
where, like, if you're not,
if you're not having kids,
like, for whatever reason,
whatever, however you were gonna justify it,
like, you're cutting off the influence
that you could have on the future generation,
and it's because you're saying,
all right, I'm gonna do,
no, I'm gonna have,
I'm gonna create this impact
in a different way or whatever,
but it's just, again,
and it's kind of one of those things
where you're like,
don't interrupt your enemy
while he's making a mistake type of things
where it's like, all right,
you know, bold strategy, Cotton.
Let's see if it pays off for him, you know?
Well, I have a,
maybe a contrarian thought on that.
Do it.
The people that don't have kids,
I actually think they're more influential
over the people that do have kids
because they're a little bit unhinged.
And they have this much more time.
Yeah, that much, yeah,
to say the least.
I mean, they're like,
they kind of have this understanding of the world
that, like,
they are actually the mother of the world,
and they enforce, like, this longhouse.
They kind of, like,
want to control everyone,
and so if they can't, like,
really have their own family to control,
so I think that might be shifting.
The power might be shifting a bit,
but that is something I am bullish on,
Bitcoin,
empowering families that want to say no
to those people,
like no to their schools,
no to their families,
no to their parents.
Oh, man.
Yeah, there you go.
Yeah, you disappeared into the board
for about 15 seconds.
So anyways, I think, like,
I love Bitcoin because it gives us power
to exit that matrix,
or I don't like that term necessarily,
but, like,
it gives us freedom to actually build
our own sort of world.
I don't really like separating,
but, like, at the same time,
there kind of has to be some divorce.
Yeah.
I don't know.
What do you guys think about that?
Like, in, not of,
but, like,
how do we actually build something
without it getting destroyed?
Like, what's the most,
what's the best way to steward civilization,
I guess?
Go ahead.
Well, I just want to say,
preface both of our talks,
both Jordan and I have talked about this before,
and I think we have different views on it,
but I think they're compatible
in interesting ways.
So, yeah, Jordan, go.
Oh, well, here, you answer first,
and then I'll,
you know what they say,
age before beauty.
Go for it.
Just kidding, no.
Okay.
So my answer is that
we're basically in,
you know, going back to the whole
Bitcoin makes everything better, right?
We have been living in a world
that has been controlled by fiat,
and a world that's controlled by fiat
means fiat, the currency,
affects everyone in the world's incentives.
You cannot move to anywhere on Earth
and escape those incentives,
no matter what.
You, like,
oh, man, I just can't stand it here,
you know,
so I'm going to move to somewhere else,
but the place that you move to
is still affected by fiat.
They might be, like, a little behind,
so they seem more, say, conservative
or more family-focused,
but they're pointing in the same direction,
so it doesn't matter where you live.
We are all under a fiat regime,
and the consequences of that mean,
well, there's no running.
The only move you can make,
the only strategic thing you can do
is either, like, do the citadel commune,
like, we're going to completely exit
and literally use Bitcoin
and not accept outside money,
which is extremely hard to do.
I don't know if there's actually anybody
who's able to even fundamentally do that,
like, for real do that.
Like, El Salvador kind of tried,
but that's not the case.
This is not even close.
The other alternative is to just
plant a flag where you are
and be like, no, I refuse to,
you know, for me, my family,
we are on a Bitcoin standard.
We are going to fight this where we are.
We're going to integrate however we can.
We're going to build a community.
We're going to educate people.
We're going to, you know,
move forward in that front.
That totally, that all of a sudden,
this is no longer a question of like,
well, what's the right thing to do?
It's like, no, no, no.
You're fighting a war now.
We are, I'm fighting a war
against an enemy that is attacking me,
and it's, if I choose to be offensive,
I might make some headway.
If I plant a flag and, you know,
make an offensive stance.
If I choose to be defensive
and retreat and retreat,
I will never be able to get that ground back
until I turn around.
Now, that's kind of like my perspective on it.
Jordan, you have a different
and interesting perspective on that.
Yeah, so what you're talking about is like,
there's generally three perspectives on this, right?
You have the run, you have the fight,
or you have like a regroup,
which is kind of like a, you know,
middle ground of the thing.
And so, again, now, this is where I will, you know,
I will win the argument
because I can point to Jesus running, you know?
There's times where there's like Jesus,
the guys are trying to throw him off the cliff,
and Jesus like escapes through the crowd, you know?
And again, now, why?
It was always a strategic running away
because Jesus is like, no,
I'm not going to die getting chucked off a cliff.
I'm going to die on a cross.
And so, like, there's, this is where, yeah,
it's like, there's, whatever you're doing,
it can't just be motivated by self-preservation.
Like, that's clearly not a sufficient motive.
And this is actually, to return to the opportune thing,
it's like, you can't use like self-convenience
or like, I want to do this thing,
and so I'm going to do it.
Like, that is, it's a deficient motivation
no matter where you find it.
Now, self-preservation and self-interested action
are two different things.
They seem similar, but they're,
and they are similar in some way,
but they're not the same thing.
And so, like, so obviously, everyone has self-interest.
Like, it's, that's, obviously,
that's just an obvious fact of living.
Like, actions affect you, but it's not,
that's different than saying,
I'm going to protect myself at any cost.
That is deficient.
And so, whether you're running temporarily,
whether you're staying and fighting,
and whether you're, or whether you're regrouping,
like, it still always needs to be a tactical thing.
There needs to be,
like, there needs to be motivation behind it.
Now, the reason and the, how I would parse out.
It has to have taste, going back to a.
Correct.
Yeah, it has to have principle.
It has to be a principled action,
which starts, which, again, is a pre,
it's a spiritual action in a real sense.
It's a pre-actualized action.
Like, this is something you're conceptualizing.
You're trying to figure out in your head
what is right to do.
And then, based on that,
then you go and carry it out in your body,
in the world.
So, the thing that I would,
the dynamics that I would want to add,
that I would be quick to add,
quick to say, are not bulletproof.
It's not, like, this is what,
if you have kids, you do this.
If you don't, you do this.
But I do think having kids plays a role here.
Yeah.
Like, there's, like, if you have,
if you have 14-year-old kids,
then your life and decisions ought to look different
than they do if you are a single person.
Yeah.
Like, because there's going to be factors
and just particular challenges,
temptations, threats
that you're going to have to be sympathetic to
or just, like, take into account
that maybe other people won't.
And so, again, this is why I'm not saying
that Bondor should flee, you know, California.
Like, this is, I don't think that that's the case.
And I think there is, again,
there are situations for people who should stay there
and they should, you know, be faithful witnesses
and they should do all these things.
At the same time, like, I look around at,
you know, in my case, I look at my kids.
And I look at my kids who, now, again,
we have family factors that complicate
or that add more color to our decision-making.
But, like, it's one of these things where, hey,
I have a limited amount of time with my kids
to train them up.
And so I want to take seriously that time.
And so, you know, there,
I have a buddy whose name is Andrew
who just moved from,
he was, his family lived in a place,
in a state for five generations.
And finally, the state passed a law
that basically said that
if parents denied their kids' gender identity,
they could be taken away by CPS and stuff.
And he's got a kid with autism, severe autism.
And, like, people at school,
at the kid's school could confuse him.
He says something about being a girl.
You know, he basically comes out,
his parents don't allow this.
Well, then they could take him away.
So he leaves his generational home,
his family's generational home for five generations.
He leaves, moves to a state
where there's more protections.
And he has a lot of people coming at him.
He's had a lot of people coming at him
like, you're such a coward, blah, blah, blah.
Like, you ran away.
You should have stayed and fought.
And he just, his basic thing was,
listen, like, I'm not just thinking about myself.
Like, you can't just think about yourself
when you have kids.
Jesus was a single man.
Paul was a single man.
They were willing to lay down rights
that God gave humans
and intended humans to have and to exercise
under normal circumstances
that neither one of them exercised
because there were other things going on.
And so I think this is just the thing
that I would want to point out
is there's more,
there's a number of more factors
to figure out how to steward
when you have other people in your life.
Yeah.
Don't really disagree with any of that.
That all sounds good, too.
Yeah.
I mean, I think, too,
like, having the right telos or telos
of goal or aim is, like,
I think, part of taste, right?
It's, like, knowing where we should go
and what we should do
or what is the most important thing
kind of, like, to love or to chase.
So having the right goal there
because, like, a single person
might be called to that
and that might be the thing they need to do, you know?
Yeah.
But making sure that it's, like, rightly ordered
is important, too,
because it could just be them saying,
oh, I just want convenience,
so I'm going to be single.
It's like...
Yep.
I doubt most people really...
I think most people that are, like,
involuntarily single
would not feel that way, but, you know.
Yeah.
Anyways, I think
trying to tie it all back together is, like,
I think Bitcoin gives us...
Bitcoin is one of the only things
that can give us margin in our lives
to actually have, like, a leisure time
that allows us space to develop taste
and to actually contemplate the world
in a way that's, like,
different than what the rat race world,
the fiat world, like, provides for you.
So I really love that Bitcoin gives humans space,
gives them more time,
more freedom to actually, like,
pursue the things that they should pursue.
So that's where I have hope,
is that on a new Bitcoin standard,
you can buy yourself time
to actually do things
that you feel like you should do.
Yep, yep.
Buy yourself time to be able to, like,
make choices that actually impact the world
and make the world closer to the truth,
more beautiful.
Like, allow...
It gives you the opportunity to do good in the world
as opposed to fiat,
which is constantly robbing your agency
and prevents you from...
or really seriously constrains you
from pursuing those things.
Mm-hmm.
So I guess...
Is it impossible on the fiat standard to do that?
No.
But it's much harder?
Jordan, you're up.
Yeah, no, I mean,
it's definitely not impossible.
It's just the...
For the average person,
it's a lot harder, right?
Because, like, there's so many more...
Yeah, it's like you're so interconnected.
Like, there's so much money
and so much structure
that you're just having to think about
that wasn't necessarily there.
I mean, like, one of the examples of this
I think about all the time, right?
And this is, like, somewhat tangential,
but, like, I read the book of Acts, right,
where you have Ananias and Sapphira?
Yeah.
Right?
Like, have you guys ever thought about
what that passage would look like
if that happened in your church, right?
Like, you have this couple comes in...
It's horrible, dude.
Dude, they offer to, like, give your church...
Hey, we're going to give the church $100,000
or $200,000.
And they just sold this building for $400,000.
They're like, listen,
we're going to give you the whole thing.
We're going to give you $200,000.
Somebody goes and checks the MLS numbers,
and they're like, actually, they sold this for $400,000.
They come in there,
and your pastor goes,
hey, guys, did you actually...
You sold this for $200,000.
Wow, that's incredible.
They're like, yeah.
Again, it was not as much as we were thinking,
but here it is.
We're grateful for it.
And then, you know, the pastor goes,
hey, you just lied.
And then they just dropped dead.
And then the wife comes in,
and similar thing.
Boom.
And then she drops dead.
Like, imagine trying to...
Their family calls the cops.
They just went there,
and supposedly they dropped dead.
Like, what do you mean supposedly?
They killed them.
It's obvious that, you know,
the pastor over there,
that guy Skyler who makes Bitcoin hats,
like, he straight up killed them
because they wanted their money.
Like, they wanted their money.
It's obvious.
Like, it's so obvious.
That's what the incentive structure dictates.
I don't care what they said.
They're making up this crazy story.
Oh, God killed them.
Like, there's so many of these things
where, like, their existence was so,
like, so much less connected than ours is
that in so much of that connection
is funded and enabled by fiat currency
by, you know, governments
that have effectively unlimited resources.
You know, many places around the world,
governments in the poorer places,
the governments that you can still get away with a lot
in a good way
because the governments don't have the resources.
They don't have unlimited resources.
And so I just think that this is...
Like, that's one of the things that I, again,
and I could be wrong about this,
but just, like, thinking about,
like, Bitcoin, it's scarce money
that forces choices to be made.
And, again, this could be gamed.
This could be abused.
And this is where, like, people just need to kind of stand up
and actually fight on a non-technical ground
to kind of stand up against a government's desire
to reinstitute the same kind of fiat games
on a Bitcoin standard.
Like, this is...
Yeah. Yeah.
Because, again, like, you could still do, like,
a Bitcoin-backed, you know, fiat currency
or a Bitcoin-backed national currency,
theoretically, at least,
that would still provide, it would restore,
it would get rid of the debt problem,
which is the political problem
that a lot of these guys are dealing with,
but it would still restore to them
the unlimited money glitch thing.
So, again, I don't know that it's actually possible.
I don't know.
Like, I'm not that, you know, happily optimistic
that things are going to be perfect on a Bitcoin standard.
But, again, I think on a long enough time horizon,
it certainly is a better situation
than the one that we're in,
or at least buys us time.
I mean, getting back to your question, Skylar,
about can it actually affect the average person,
I think it's an obvious yes.
And the obvious yes comes from, you know,
if your income is in Bitcoin,
then...
And you can just do this today.
I mean, it's not easy,
but you can literally, like,
renegotiate your employment contract.
Say, take a 10% pay cut,
but just have a flat rate
of now you're just paid in Bitcoin.
And the consequences of that action
mean you never suffer inflation again,
which means that that point going forward,
you know, maybe it takes a couple months
or a couple years to actually, like,
really make a difference for you.
But from that point going forward,
you're not suffering from inflation anymore.
That means that all of your costs,
like, whenever the grocery store costs go up,
well, Bitcoin follows them to global M2.
So, you know, maybe it doesn't hit milk exactly,
but it's going to hit the eggs.
Or maybe it doesn't hit, you know,
the oranges exactly
because they go from Chile or whatever.
But, you know, it's going to hit the beef,
which came from Argentina, right?
Yeah.
In total, in aggregate,
over a long time frame,
you're just not suffering from inflation anymore.
You're not suffering from inflation anymore.
You don't have the inflationary pressure.
You have, as you're talking about,
more time to think about this stuff.
Now, Jordan's point,
maybe governments figure out a way to, you know,
manipulate the system and all this other stuff.
You know, if they can,
I feel like somebody would have done that already,
not a government,
just like a corporation or somebody, right?
And I just, I mean, hopefully they can't.
I don't think they can.
Well, again, it wouldn't happen now.
That's the thing, right?
Like, the fiat doesn't get debased until,
or sorry, gold doesn't get debased
until it dominates the whole system, right?
Like it's, there's a timeliness to this,
and this is how it always happens, right?
Like the, you get the,
gold is the dominant thing in the system.
And then you, it becomes,
so it's super beneficial,
but then over time it becomes inconvenient.
And so then you debase it
to get some of that convenience back.
And so the convenience cycle, you know,
it springs through.
Sure, but is like,
what's the convenience cycle on Bitcoin?
How are you going to have something
that's more convenient than Lightning, for instance?
Like, we're talking about millisecond transactions.
Well, here's how.
More convenient.
Well, no, here's how.
This is exactly how.
The first time that somebody takes somebody's Bitcoin
and they, like, they grab their wallet
when they're going to send something
and they, like, grab the phone out of their hand
and they transfer all that Bitcoin
to another, a wallet that they control
while some of their friends are holding the people.
And then you have somebody who basically says,
my entire life savings got stolen because of Bitcoin.
And then the government just goes,
hey, here's government Bitcoin or whatever.
Like, where you're just like,
here, we can provide a security thing
where we can give you your money back.
Again, obviously it's an awful take.
I'm not saying that this is, like,
but it provides a short-term benefit.
It provides a short-term, like,
if you're somebody who's been bred by the system
to think five minutes ahead of time
and not, you know, months, years, generations, whatever,
like, that short-term, immediate benefit
is going to be, and detriment,
by contrast with the Bitcoin, losing the Bitcoin,
like, it's going to, there's going to be a lot of people
who are just willing to, like, hop back on the government,
you know, issued cocaine
if it's going to mean that they can at least
superficially get their money back.
Like, I think that's a big carrot for a lot of people.
I mean, ultimately, there's a window for that, though, right?
Because as Bitcoin affects the large-scale demographics
and everything else,
we start to see all the high-time preference stuff
really start to come out generation after generation.
So, yeah, that's probably going to happen at some point.
But, you know, every generation,
we're on generation, whatever it is,
I have now a fiat currency,
and every generation going forward,
it's like, we've been pushing this direction,
we're not pushing the other direction.
And it's not even distributed and all that other stuff,
but we're now, people are, in real time,
the time preferences are elongating.
And the internet helps with this, AI helps with this,
Bitcoin helps with this.
We're all, the time preferences are getting longer and longer.
We're able to see, like, oh, yeah,
I can just really easily search.
Last time somebody got elected,
what their policy was and how they failed
and how this person is getting elected for the same reason
and how we know it's going to fail again.
And so we're not putting hope into that anymore.
We're looking for deeper solutions, right?
So, yeah, there's definitely a time
for, like, that attack to take place.
But I think every day,
every hour that it doesn't happen
is like TikTok next block, TikTok next block.
All right, you guys, we should be wrapping it up.
Skylar, do you have any last call, shout-outs?
Anything else, any last words, anything you got?
I mean, come to Vegas.
Let's all hang out in Vegas if you guys want.
I'm doing a panel on Bitcoin design
on the open source stage
with a couple cool Bitcoin designers.
And I'm bringing my new hats,
which I have multiple colors in.
Let's go.
And there's only two of these
because they're so obnoxious.
But I know that there will be people that want those.
So, anyways, I would love to hang out in Vegas
if you guys are watching this.
Come hit us up.
Go to the Thank God for Bitcoin barbecue.
Is there still tickets?
There's still tickets.
There's still a few.
They're going to go fast
because we have a group of 25
that looks like they're going to come.
So that means we have less than 25 tickets left.
So go grab them.
I'll be there.
Let's hang out in Vegas.
It cracked me up
because when you first started mentioning Bondor,
you started mentioning different Italian artists.
All I could think of was it's hilarious
because Skylar looks like he's wearing
the Bitcoin version of a Mario hat.
Just following in their footsteps.
It's great.
All right, Jordan.
Last words.
What do you got?
I'm good.
You shilled the barbecue for me.
Appreciate you guys, Skylar.
Love you, bro.
And, yeah, appreciate all of you guys watching.
See you soon.
All right, everybody.
This has been Better Buy Bitcoin.
Peace.
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